Here, Have Some Free Online Education

The excellent people ant NUIT have helped me put together a series of small videos that complement my Microeconomic Theory course. I start teaching today and I will be posting the videos here as the course progresses. You can find my slides here and eventually all the videos will be there too, organized by lecture. These videos are 5-10 minutes each and are meant to be high-level synopses of the main themes of each lecture. The slides as well as the videos are released to the public domain under Creative Commons (non-commercial, attribution, share-alike) licenses. The first video is on Welfare Economics and features figure skating.

8 comments

I found a couple of parts of Gans’s piece particularly interesting:
First, the MRU model that Gans talks about (students watch video outside of class, then come to class to discuss/work in groups/etc.), is something that professors (at least here at Duke, and I suspect elsewhere) have been experimenting with – using the iTunes University and, now, things like Coursera. In fact, by my understanding, that’s one of the main value propositions of the Courseras of the world: a university can get, say, their econ lecture material from the Jeff Elys, and then use the class time to discuss and more-fully engage students who are supposed to have already learned the material. In its extreme form, it’s called, “Flipping the Classroom” – the lecture is the “homework,” and the “homework” is worked on during “lecture” time.

Second, given that this was built into Coursera’s design, I”m not sure it will necessarily be as disruptive as Gans thinks it will be. What might be disruptive is if the better professors decide to follow the MRU, everything-free approach, instead of those professors using their university’s resources (videographers, recording studios, educational video specialists, etc.). Those details impose a large cost (in terms of time), time that might otherwise be used doing research, or giving talks, or consulting, or whatnot. Not sure that there will be as large a move to that as Gans seems to believe.

It appears to me that, in sporting contests, should problems often come up, when more than two teams are competing for a prize. Except in tennis, where they follow a pre-decided order (seeding). This would violate the no-dictator thing (perhaps?), but there is no ranking reversal that affects the outcome of any one tournament.

Amy what a great site you have going! Have you seen the Korgi books by Christian Slade? They’re actually kind of like griahpc novels, and made me think of a category you could do about books with no words .we came upon them at our library and Edie loves them. So far he’s done 2 volumes. A couple other really fun wordless books Zoom, ReZoom, and The Gray Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher. Have fun!